Slate: “What is Haley’s strategy for balancing her party’s competing interests going to be? Well, don’t ask her! Or do, but be prepared to get a different answer every time. As Alberta notes, the prospective candidate took three positions on Trump’s effort to overturn the election during a six-week period in which he was following her for the story. First, in December, she called Trump a “friend” who genuinely believed he’d gotten more votes than Biden; shortly after the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6, she said she was “angry” and “disgusted” at the president and told Alberta he had disgraced himself to the point of being finished in politics; on Jan. 25, she went on Fox News during prime time and described him as the victim of Democratic obsession who deserved to be given “a break” for inspiring the insurrection against Congress.
As Alberta documents in detail, this flip-flop was just a microcosm of the approach that Haley has taken to tensions within the Republican Party during her political career—which, he says, followed a childhood and early adulthood that bear little evidence of interest in politics or government. She began her electoral life as an iconoclastic fiscal hard-liner, won the South Carolina governorship by running as a Sarah Palin–endorsed underdog, and became a national figure by taking down Confederate flags after the Emanuel AME Church massacre despite having no previous involvement in racial justice issues. She denounced Trump repeatedly in 2016, when she was supporting Marco Rubio’s smiley American dream Republicanism, but then joined the Trump administration. Once there, Alberta says, she became one of the ex-president’s most enduring (but still nominally respectable) advisers by occasionally criticizing him in public while keeping his trust in private by contacting him frequently to disparage the judgment of others in his circle.
…But Alberta’s story makes a much more thorough case that Haley doesn’t have an authentic political self and never will. He depicts someone who likes to win elections and made what was an otherwise circumstantial decision to participate in the dominant local culture of her home state by running as a Republican. Beyond that, her attitude seems to be that the right position is whichever one works. And it does work: Alberta also quotes a lot of people, not all of them friendly to Haley, who have been impressed over the years with her ability to persuade both regular voters and elite gatekeepers that she feels strongly about the same things as they do. (Liberal readers may find themselves involuntarily charmed by a section about Haley’s reaction to Ted Cruz, an anecdote that could not have been more perfectly leaked to convey that she isn’t one of those Republicans.)”